Find out more about Manu, a series of handwriting fonts.

Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Slovak Republic has unveiled new logo, slogan and branding of Slovakia. The whole process to find an international identification brand for Slovakia lasted seven years. Creative Department, advertising agency from Bratislava has been responsible for the branding, selecting Typotheque History font system, because of its variability. History unifies various expressions of Slovak creativity, from product design, software development, architecture, sport and tourism.

All images courtesy of Creative Department

Part of the branding project was also the unification of the visual identity of public administration which will now have a unified visual which will be differentiated according to the levels of state administration. The new logotype is mandatory for all ministries and central state bodies. History is used also on the state administration logos, combined with Greta Sans.

Peter Biľak (of Typotheque) and Nikola Djurek (of Typonine) have been working together for over 10 years, and this close personal and professional collaboration has already led to the publication of many of Djurek’s fonts through Typotheque. Djurek also published other designs through his own foundry, however, and deciding where to publish new designs became increasingly difficult. We are now pleased to announce that Nikola is joining Typotheque, which is the logical next step in their working relationship. We are very excited to announce that Typonine’s entire award-winning collection of typefaces will be available exclusively on Typotheque from now on.

Typonine’s collection has gained international recognition for its quality and innovation. Marlene, for example, was named one of the best typefaces of the decade in ATypI’s Letter 2 competition. Balkan Sans, and Tremolo won the Type Directors Club award for typeface design in 2012 and 2016 respectively. Tremolo was also featured in Typographica’s ‘Favorite Typefaces of 2015’, joining Audree (2013), Nocturno (2013) and Typonine Stencil (2008).

Other typefaces just quietly flew under the radar, proving their value in real life situations, such as the industrial sans Surogat, constructed slab Tesla Slab, or Mote, a utilitarian grotesque.

We believe that our combined catalogues can provide solutions for the most demanding users and can handle the most complex typographic situations spanning many languages and platforms. We are equally committed to creating quality typefaces that reflect our time and serve its purpose.

We celebrate the news with a new combined type specimen presenting the full Typotheque/Typonine collection.

Bara is inspired by the carved, incised metal types of the Dutch Golden Age. It is not a historical revival, but a loose interpretation of Schefferletter, (also known as Enschedé English-bodied Roman No. 6), a historical typeface whose origins are unclear, but which probably dates to the early 16th century.

Narrow and elegant, it defines a new all-purpose text family with three optical sizes while preserving some particularities of the original metal type. At text sizes, Bara gives text a pleasant, slightly darker texture; at larger sizes, it draws attention to its warm, unorthodox details, such as the abruptly ended strokes of ‘e’ or the ‘c’.

Bara is available in three optical sizes: Normal for small text, Display for subheads and medium-size texts, and Grande, for large titles and headlines.

A few weeks ago, the Mac OS font testing and rental app Fontstand introduced powerful filtering possibilities that help help to reduce thousands of fonts only to the ones you really need.

We are now delighted to announce that Fontstand has allowed to export their metadata, so Typotheque can benefit from the work that Indra Kupferschmid has made for Fontstand. Indra has categorised all fonts using 66 visual parameters. We have exported now the data, and used a similar filtering on our main font page. Since we have recently added Typonine collection, advanced type filtering helps to find only the fonts you really need.

For example, there is 124 font families in total right now.

which you can filter by Category, narrowing down the selection to 62 font families,

applying an additional filter that selects only fonts with large x-height, getting 40 font families

26 of which contain Small Caps features

and 16 of Sans-serif fonts with large x-height having Small Caps substitution feature also support Cyrillic languages.

We invite you to browse the font categories, and believe that these detailed font parameters will make it easier to find the fonts you are really looking for.

Zico is sturdy and dominant, but not constructed, preserving the dynamics of the hand lettering that inspired it. Its Thin styles are precise, almost monolinear shapes, but the contrast increases just enough at heavier weights to open up the counters, which makes the Regular styles suitable for continuous text settings, while Black styles are saturated and compact. The Display styles reduce white space to a minimum, sometimes resulting in unusual contrast distribution.

Zico and Zico Display families are powerful toolkits for the most demanding designers, carrying everything you need to create effective text hierarchies, strong headlines and eye-catching titles.

Parmigiano type system came out in 2014, with additional Parmigiano releases in 2015, creating a complete solution for most demanding designers. Early applications of fonts are important as they often set the tone, and influence a second wave of users. We are delighted to find Parmigiano it the inspirational cultural publications. Let’s see how Parmigiano has been used since published exactly two years ago:

Múzeum Café is a 100-page, bi-monthly magazine published by the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest covering domestic and international art events, workshops and developments. In its recent redesign, Péter Salát Zalán from the creative team Lead 82 chose Parmigiano type system for the journal. Múzeum Café is using various optical sizes of Parmigiano, Headline for the large titles, Caption for the main body text, and Parmigiano Sans as the complementary typeface style. The designer of the Múzeum Café Péter Salát Zalán has received multiple international awards for his work.

Hungarian is also an interesting language, unrelated to languages of Hungary's geographic neighbours, and the only one that uses double acutes called hungarumlaut.

Another recent project using Parmigiano is Nang, a brand new independent magazine dedicated to the cinema culture in Asia. As Nang exists in print and online, the basic Typotheque Print & Web license fits it perfectly.

Edited by Davide Cazzaro, each of the 10 planned issues is set to explore a specific theme and created in collaboration with a different group of guest editors and contributors. The magazine is designed by Korean designers Shin Shin (Shin Haeok & Shin Donghyeok). Nang uses Parmigiano Stencil for the magazine word mark and main titles, accompanied by Parmigiano Text.

Finally, another cultural publication that uses Parmigiano is Croatian book Umijeće sakupljanja razglednic (The art of collecting postcards) dedicated to cartophilia and its methods of selection and presentation of postcards.

Beautifully bound, written by Krunoslav Leko, designed by Damir Bralić, Lana Grahek and Igor Kudiz, using Parmigiano Sans for headlines and captions, and Parmigiano Text for the body text.

Obviously, we don't see all examples of our fonts, only those that the users actually share with us. If you used any of Typotheque fonts, please send us samples, and receive a €20 voucher for the next purchase.

In collaboration with the Indian Type Foundry, we are now pleased to introduce Bengali (Bangla), and Tamil version of Fedra Sans, our popular typeface for use in print and screen. After Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Armenian, Devanagari, Inuktitut versions, Bengali and Tamil extensions are the eight, an ninth writing script supported by Fedra Sans, covering yet more speakers and cultures. Malayalam version of Fedra Sans is in development, which will make the support of major languages of India even more comprehensive.

Download the PDF specimen.

Illustrations by Shiva Nallaperumal.

Sometimes there are situations when a friendly typeface is just too intrusive. Sometimes you just want a typeface that gets the job done. No fuss, no frills. There are a few such utilitarian typefaces, but they are mostly designed for signage. We wanted to create a typeface that had the same no-nonsense attitude, but could also be used for continuous text. Rational, standardised, more practical than personal.

November is available in three logical widths (Normal, Condensed, Compressed). And when the job takes you around the globe, November is ready to go with you. Supporting not only Latin script, but also Cyrillic, Greek, and Hebrew, November is ready to get down to business in over 200 languages. Arabic version will be released shortly by TPTQ Arabic.

Francis draws its inspiration from an early 20th century lettering style often seen in European advertising, but also from the rational geometry that lends a rhythm to the typeface in text. Unlike most typefaces, the light styles of Francis are intended for the largest text sizes, and as the typeface gains weight, it also gains legibility at smaller sizes. From light to black, Francis goes from extremely compressed to a more airy design, keeping the highly modulated contrast of its thick and thin strokes. The true italics offer unexpected flair to the typeface. The letters nearly touch each other, creating a cursiveness that produces flowing headlines.

Francis’ real tour de force, however is its collection of four Gradient styles, capital-only display versions that produce dynamically increasing or decreasing character widths. These remarkable text patterns are possible because each Gradient style contains 2,690 glyphs that are selected automatically using OpenType’s Contextual Alternates feature. These gradient patterns can be applied to individual words, or to whole lines of text.

Frances is suited for many large-text uses spanning editorial design, posters, corporate design and advertising. One word of warning: Francis is seriously playful and addictive, so don’t work with it unless you have plenty of time for your project!

Illustrations by Shiva Nallaperumal. GIFs created by Henry Becker&Andrew Paul Keiper.

October is a warmer version of November. While November is a rational, utilitarian typeface inspired by street signage, October has a different relationship to its industrial past. Its round letter terminals were created by the rotary cutters of a CNC router. Changing the size of the cutters changed the stroke widths of the letterforms.

Starting with simple, monolinear skeletons of November’s various weights, we used the router to engrave the letters in a block of wood, experimenting with the sizes of the letters and the milling cutters. The results were optically corrected to create a functional digital font family that works at a variety of medium to large text sizes.

October emanates the same no-frills, no-nonsense attitude as November, but its rounded stroke endings lend it a friendlier character useful for signage, branding, headlines and even editorial purposes. It is available in three logical widths (Normal, Condensed, Compressed), and three writing scripts (Latin, Cyrillic, Greek). Hebrew and Arabic are under development and will follow shortly.

Illustrations by Shiva Nallaperumal

Thesaurus and Thesaurus Display blend particular features of the original metal types used by the Estiennes with more contemporary characteristics such as a large x-height, narrower forms and increased modulation. The result is a versatile typeface with a rational flavour, with one foot in the past and one foot in the present.

View the detailed PDF.

Thesaurus is based on the types that Robert Estienne brought from Paris to Geneva, and in some way, serve as a bridge between France and Switzerland, between Catholicism and Protestantism, and now, through Thesaurus, between past and present. Thesaurus was designed by Fermín Guerrero.

In the spirit of its open-source initiatives, Mozilla, the maker of the Firefox open-source browser, decided to be completely transparent about its entire rebranding process, documenting it extensively online. The project is being executed in partnership with Johnson Banks, the London-based brand identity agency, and the public is invited to observe its development and comment on the process.

Firefox set a milestone in web typography by being the first browser to support the WOFF webfont format that made the webfont boom possible. Shortly thereafter, in October 2009, Typotheque became the first foundry to launch a webfont service, and license its entire collection for both print and web. So when Mozilla’s creative directors Yuliya Gorlovetsky and Tim Murray approached us to define the typography of the new wordmark we were thrilled to contribute to this project.

We started by looking at our collection of existing typefaces, identifying Tesla Slab as a suitable basis for the new wordmark. Tesla was only a starting point, however, and all letterforms were modified to create an entirely new design. Here is the process that led to the final form of the wordmark:

With the wordmark finished, we were asked to design a complementary typeface to match the personality of the new logo. Starting again from Tesla Slab, we crafted a new typeface specifically for this project: Zilla.

Graphics by Johnson Banks

Once it is finalised Zilla will become a freely available open-source typeface. At this moment, we are defining which styles the family will contain and what language support it will include.

It has been an exciting project, and since Mozilla engaged with the design and tech community throughout the design process Zilla has been warmly welcomed by the public on the internet, a rare feat these days, when everyone is a critic. Perhaps the method of giving a voice to users early on through times of change is an idea that we can all learn from.

Animation by Johnson Banks

Just like Nocturno, Diurnal is both crisp and flowing, providing superb legibility at all sizes. Designed by Nikola Djurek, Diurnal belongs to that group of rare humanist sans serifs designed for long, continuous reading, following the lead of Hans Eduard Meier’s Syntax (1969), or more recently Evert Bloemsma’s Legato (2004). Diurnal’s generous x-height and unapologetically calligraphic rhythm emphasise the sense of horizontality, leading readers’ eyes along for an immersive experience.

Diurnal comes in two optical sizes, Text and a sharper, more compact and expressive Display. In combination with its serif companions Nocturno and Nocturno Display, Diurnal is ideal for complex layouts by the most demanding typographers.

Illustrations by Shiva Nallaperumal

More utilitarian than the original Nara, Nara Sans aims for better usability and a more contemporary feel in an economical visual style. It is closely based on Nara’s rational structure of strokes and its humanist calligraphy models, and although it is somewhat softer and gentler, it is still cut quite sharply for a humanist sans.

See full PDF specimen.

While the upright versions would readily suit any long text setting as well as the occasional headline, the cursive and italic styles are much more distinct and provide plenty of character, especially in the heavier weights. There, the calligraphic details and terminals edge closer to disruption, providing some lively opportunities to explore typographic details or a distinct text structure. The two secondary styles enable the setting of even the most complex text hierarchies, giving this spirited family sufficient versatility for any job.

As with the original Nara, Nara Sans Cursive uses the exact same set of uppercase letters as the upright Nara Sans to accompany a much narrower lowercase. The aesthetic inspiration for this concept lies in the early Aldine italics, which began with lowercase letters only, with the uppercase letters consisting of roman capitals at the beginning of the sentences. This however proved to be challenging during the design process, requiring extensive testing to find a weight compromise that suited both text and display applications. The resulting text feel of both cursive and italic styles is not overly uniform but accentuates the underlying ‘handwritten’ character of these styles.

Nara Sans was designed by Andrej Krátky, with the assistance of Slávka Pauliková, Nikola Djurek, and Marko Hrastovec. Specimen illustrations by Shiva Nallaperumal.

Each subfamily of Plotter reflects the characteristics of the various tools that inspired the project, tools from an age when technical diagrams were drawn and lettered by hand, and draftsmen needed a simple, efficient way to produce legible text that met established norms. Plotter has the simplified monolinear strokes with round terminals produced by technical pens, its letters reduced to their most basic stencilform elements: stems, arms, curves and diagonals.

Family Structure

The family consists of two main versions: Plotter, which features true curves, and Plotter Liner, which contains only straight segments. Both sub families contain Basic, Monospaced, Stencil, Monospaced Stencil, and Display versions with five filling layers. There is also a separate Plotter Hand version with irregular, hand-drawn shapes created using actual architectural stencils, and Plotter Wave, a smart letter-substitution version which selects sloping letter variants contextually according to their position in the word. All in all, there are 47 fonts available either as 12 separate packages or all together as Plotter Suite.

For more information see the article: Making Letters for Drafting, by Florian Hardwig and Thomas Maier.

Sloped Styles

While many scribing devices produced letters that are inclined in fixed angle, Plotter’s upright forms can be inclined mathematically to any angle, including backslants. The playful Plotter Wave, the latest of Djurek’s explorations of smart OpenType substitution, shows this off to great effect, creating words with an unusual rhythm and structure as the letters progress from extreme backslant to extreme right slant.

Illustrations by Shiva Nallaperumal.

I have been admiring traditional Mediterranean architecture for quite some time, and in Catalonia, Spain, Portugal, and North Africa colourful cement floor tiles (also known as hydrolic tiles) play an important role in that tradition. Made of a mixture of marble powder, mineral pigments and cement, they are made by hand, one at a time, using a mold and a hydraulic press in a labour-intensive process that gives them a unique depth and character.

A year ago, I had the privilege of speaking at the Es Baluard Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Palma, Mallorca, where I met Biel Huguet, director of Huguet Rajoles Hidràuliques, and grandson of the company’s founder. Huguet makes custom tiles for high end architecture, and amongst their clients are designers and architects like Herzog & de Meuron, Sybilla, Lievore, Barozzi Veiga and Häberli.

I became fascinated by the manufacturing process and the tiles’ possibilities. Working with tiles is similar to working with letters in that the idea is to create individual forms that you then assemble into a continuous texture. What makes it different, however, is that there is no background and foreground; the forms can’t leave any negative space, which is why hydrolic tiles are typically square. After coming back from Mallorca, I started to research whether it was possible to create decorative patterns not by printing them on tiles, but by using the tile shapes themselves.

Days of sketching and experimenting led me to this simple form.

The shape alone provides a wide range of combinatory possibitities. When colour is used, the possibilities are almost endless. I spoke to Biel, who agreed to make prototypes which would be used first in our new house in The Hague. Almost a year later, we have the first implementation.

I am very proud that Huguet now offers my bespoke tiles in their collection, available on demand. They are extremely durable, crafted responsibly by people who love not only tradition, embrace innovation and are ready to think outside of the square.

Inspired by the geometric Kufic style of traditional Arabic calligraphy, Calcula has grown far beyond its beginnings as Shiva Nallaperumal’s student project at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Its maze-like complexity is created by the fixed width of the white spaces between and within letters, a feature which required complex OpenType programming and the creation of over 6,000 ligatures per style. While Calcula is a functional typeface, its design principles are rooted in lettering, in that each letter reacts to neighbouring letters, adapting to its context. Calcula is great for creating patterns from single letters, combinations of letters, or even entire words.

Read this in-depth essay about developing Calcula.

Tal Leming, Shiva’s teacher at MICA, programmed the OpenType features of Calcula, and wrote several iterations of the scripts that build the ligatures based on predefined rules. Frederik Berlaen wrote the scripts that constructed Calcula’s layering styles.

Zico Hebrew is a large collection of typefaces in three styles—a clean, versatile Sans, a robust and uncompromisingSlab, and dark and expressiveDisplay, a compact headline font.

The Slab and Display are inspired by the aesthetics of sports, racing cars, baseball jerseys, and tennis ball packaging. They all share a boldness as well as dynamics of speed and robust action, a confident typeface with the sound of the crowd cheering in the background. The Sans version is intended for more subtle expression and practical typography.

Originally designed by Marko Hrastovec, a Type & Media alumnus as his graduation project in 2015; Zico Hebrew was designed by Daniel Grumer, after graduation from the Type & Media a year later, connected by their former teacher Peter Biľak.

‘After studying in Type and Media for a year, I came back to Tel Aviv with a lot of new questions and motivation to explore. One was ‘how come we don’t have versatile type families with many styles that match all kinds of applications’ — says Grumer. ‘It was as if this chunky inline style was looking at me, quietly begging that I’ll start sketching Hebrew letter shapes that carries the same blend of aesthetic properties’.

There is no tradition of Sans or Serif type categories in Hebrew typography, so working on a Sans and Slab was a challenge. Grumer chose to add generous termination strokes in logical places of in- and out- strokes, in order to express the chunky feeling of a slab-serif typeface.

The result is a Hebrew type family with a unique tone-of-voice that combines humour, seriousness and muscle. ‘Each style has a different feel: The Sans is probably the eldest son, the serious one; then comes the Slab, which has more muscle and speaks very clear; and the Display, which is the funniest member of this family’, concludes Grumer.

Download the PDF specimen of the Zico font family, and see below for more details.

After a decade of working with Arabic type, Typotheque launches a collection of typefaces to cover another Semitic writing script — Hebrew. Arabic and Hebrew are related, and type systems that encompass them both can be very useful.

The aim of this seven-year project was not to create a particular style or a typeface family, but rather a complete Hebrew type programme: rigorous, high-contrast typefaces for continuous text, low-contrast fonts for identities and branding, and display typefaces for expressive typography.

The fonts in this release were created both in-house and in collaboration with leading Israeli type designers Michal Sahar and Yanek Iontef, as well as with younger, up-and-coming designers Daniel Grumer and Daniel Berkovitz. Read more about the process of designing Hebrew in this essay.

The collection includes 21 full typeface families and over 200 individual fonts, including many firsts. Greta Sans Hebrew, with its four widths, and ten weights, is probably the largest Hebrew type system to date; Greta Text Hebrew, probably the first text type with five weights and three grades for fine typographic control; Parmigiano Hebrew, probably the first digital type system in four optical sizes, and additionally one of the few fonts that correctly renders the cantillation marks required for setting religious texts. Greta Text and Fedra Serif also come with unique cursive styles for creating proper typographic hierarchies for complex projects. Read more about secondary styles for Hebrew.

These fonts are just being released now, but they have been already recognised internationally. Greta Sans Hebrew won the Certificate of Excellence at the Type Directors Club in NYC. Fedra Serif Hebrew, Greta Text Hebrew and November Hebrew received prizes at the Granshan type competition.

We have produced a new typeface specimen (No. 15) specially for this occasion, presenting Typotheque’s entire collection of Hebrew (and Arabic and Latin) fonts. Get your copy online for the symbolic price of €5.

We are proud to announce this collection of Hebrew fonts, with the hope that they can help local and international designers to make new designs and properly express their voices and culture. Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions about these typefaces.